Where our Saviour appears bowed to the earth, prostrate, half swooning with the anguish of that dread moment, and an angel is seen sustaining him, there is a true feeling of the real meaning of Scripture; but even in such examples the effect is often spoiled by an attempt to render the scene at once more mystical and more palpable. Thus a painter equally remarkable for the purity of his taste and deep religious feeling, Niccolò Poussin, has represented Christ, in his agony, supported in the arms of an angel, while a crowd of child-angels, very much like Cupids, appear before him with the instruments of the Passion; ten or twelve bear a huge cross; others hold the scourge, the crown of thorns, the nails, the sponge, the spear, and exhibit them before him, as if these were the images, these the terrors, which could overwhelm with fear and anguish even the _human_ nature of such a Being![46] It seems to me also a mistake, when the angel is introduced, to make him merely an accessory (as Raphael has done in one of his early pictures), a little figure in the air to help the meaning: since the occasion was worthy of angelic intervention, in a visible shape, bringing divine solace, divine sympathy, it should be represented under a form the most mighty and the most benign that Art could compass;—but has it been so? I can recollect no instance in which the failure has not been complete. If it be said that to render the angelic comforter so superior to the sorrowing and prostrate Redeemer would be to detract from _His_ dignity as the principal personage of the scene, and thus violate one of the first rules of Art, I think differently—I think it could do so only in unskilful hands. Represented as it ought to be, and might be, it would infinitely enhance the idea of that unimaginable anguish which, as we are told, was compounded of the iniquities and sorrows of all humanity laid upon _Him_. It was not the pang of the Mortal, but the Immortal, which required the presence of a ministering spirit sent down from heaven to sustain him. [Illustration: 21 Lamenting Angel in a Crucifixion (Campo Santo)] In the Crucifixion, angels are seen lamenting, wringing their hands, averting or hiding their faces. In the old Greek crucifixions, one angel bears the sun, another the moon, on each side of the cross:— ... dim sadness did not spare, That time, celestial visages. Michael Angelo gives us two unwinged colossal-looking angel heads, which peer out of heaven in the background of his Crucifixion in a manner truly supernatural, as if they sympathised in the consummation, but in awe rather than in grief.